Groundbreaking ceremonies were held here Sunday for construction of a memorial to the writers, many of them Jewish, whose books were burned by the Nazis.
Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, whose proposal for the memorial won first prize in a competition, helped lay the cornerstone.
The memorial, which will be an underground library, is scheduled to be completed in 1995. It will display books by such writers as Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann.
Heine was Jewish. Mann, a non-Jew, married a Jew and introduced estimable Jewish characters into his works, spoke out against the Nazis, went into voluntary exile from Germany and was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis.
At the ceremony, which was held where book-burnings took place, Construction Senator Wolfgang Nagel reminded the audience of the importance of the monument at “a time when ultraright ideas (have) become acceptable in solid middle-class circles.” He called on Germans to reject intolerance, violence and anti-Semitism.
Ullman’s parents escaped from Germany in 1933. His grandparents were detained in a concentration camp.
A teacher at the Art Academy in the eastern German city of Stuttgart, Ullman said he had been planning the monument for 10 years.
He added that the memorial was being built at “the right place at the right moment.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
